Monday, August 27, 2012

Shares of Samsung Electronics
shares plunged 7% on Monday or lost $12 billion in market cap after Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL)
defeated the company in a long patents war.

The long-led global battle between
two largest Silicon Valley giants for patent lawsuit has now finally ended
crowning Apple Inc. with victory of more than $1.05 billion against Samsung
Electronics Co. The nine-member U.S. jury finally ruled the verdict in favour
of Apple Inc. after confirming that all of Apple's patents at stake in the
trial were valid in the federal court in San Jose, California.

After a long court session which
went for 25long hours of evidence and testimony at the trial before they started
deliberating Aug. 22, the court found that Samsung infringed six of seven
patents for mobile devices in the first lawsuit to go before a U.S. jury in a
fight for dominance of the global smartphone market. The panel was given more
than two hours of instructions and a 20-page verdict form.

The company had sued Samsung
Electronics Co. in April 2011 for infringing its patents. Samsung Electronics
Co. had countersued Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, California. This waged a
legal global battle between the two world's two largest makers of the high-end
handheld devices that blend the functionality of a phone and a computer across
U.S., U.K., Australia and South Korea. The germ of the dispute was Samsung’s
release of its Galaxy smartphones in 2010 which made Steve Jobs, the co-founder
of Apple Inc. raise concerns on Samsung violating its patents.

After receiving a clean chit from
the court, Apple sought $2.5 billion to $2.75 billion for its claims that
Suwon, South Korea- based Samsung infringed four design patents and three
software patents in copying the iPhone and iPad. It further wants to make permanent
a preliminary ban it won on U.S. sales of a Samsung tablet computer and extend
the ban to Samsung smartphones. This is a huge step which would cause a heavy damage
to the counterpart. The questions over damages awards were among the more than
600 questions the jury was asked to address and Samsung Electronics had
demanded for as much as $421.8 million in royalties considering that Apple had
infringed five of its patents.

However, U.S. District Judge Lucy
Koh, who presided over the San Jose trial, would decide that on Apple’s claim
to ban smartphones in U.S. herself without the jury.